One of the chief negotiators of the state legislature’s revived housing bill told CT Examiner this week that the bill was “final stages of getting to an agreement” before going to lawmakers.
State House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, has been one of the chief negotiators working with Gov. Ned Lamont and fellow lawmakers and groups including the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to find consensus on a bill the governor is willing to sign.
House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, confirmed to CT Examiner that lawmakers will convene Nov. 12 and 13 to take up several items including a response to possible cuts from the federal government and a housing bill.
Lamont vetoed a wide-ranging housing bill, HB 5002, earlier this summer in the face of widespread appeals for maintaining local control of development.
Rojas declined to offer specifics on the negotiations, telling CT Examiner, “I think they [opponents of original bill] will be less concerned with the bill than they were in June.”
Rojas also lashed out at state GOP lawmakers, after State Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe, and the ranking chair of the Housing Committee, talked to CT Examiner about conversations with Lamont last month.
“I don’t know if the intent of the meeting was to remain confidential, but that’s part of the problem of trying to work with Republicans,” Rojas told CT Examiner. “If we are going to have a conversation and we are negotiating, [it] shouldn’t be a matter of public record. … I negotiate in good faith, so I am not going to disclose it [specifics of revised bill] outside of the negotiating process. Quite frankly, it’s part of the reason why people do not have a seat at the [negotiating] table.”
Rojas blamed Republican lawmakers for turning a blind eye to housing affordability.
“I don’t have any reason to believe that they [GOP] want to do anything to address housing affordability in Connecticut,” said Rojas.
Scott told CT Examiner that he and State Rep. Joe Zullo, R-East Haven and a member of the Housing Committee, met with Lamont in his office for 30 minutes on Sept. 17.
During that meeting, Scott told CT Examiner, the governor was firm in what he did not want to see in any Fair Share offerings – specifically targeted numbers tied to affordable housing units in specific communities.
The Fair Share provision of the original housing bill called for the state to assign each town a target number of new affordable housing units, with a goal of building 120,000 qualifying affordable housing units across Connecticut within 10 years, or face the possible loss of state funding.
Scott said the governor told them he did not want a specific number of affordable housing units in the latest bill and that those numbers had to come out.
“I hope he stands strong on that. He stated that publicly, not just in the meeting with me and Representative Zullo, but has said that publicly many times he doesn’t want those numbers in the bill hanging over the head [of towns] like they were previously,” Scott told CT Examiner. “I think that’s one of the biggest sticking points right now between the legislative Democrats and the governor’s office … I don’t want him to cave. I’ll be very, very disappointed and I think the people of Connecticut will be disappointed and a lot of these municipalities will be disappointed, Republican and Democratic like towns.”
Asked to respond, Rob Blanchard, the governor’s director of communications, told CT Examiner:
“The governor has met with advocates, organizations such as CCM and COST [Council of Small Towns] and state and local leaders on both sides of the aisle to hear their ideas and proposals for a new, revised housing bill. He appreciated hearing different viewpoints and strategies and will ultimately incorporate some of them into a new housing bill. The governor remains committed to continuing to collaborate with those who have real ideas and suggestions on improving the housing bill ahead of eventual passage.”
Those with knowledge of the negotiating process told CT Examiner that the hotly-contested Fair Share component of the bill will have a different look when it goes to vote this fall.
Joseph DeLong, CEO and executive director of CCM for 10 years, said he’s been a “collaborator” in the negotiating process. He said his organization meets at least weekly on the latest bill with either the governor, his staff or the Office of Policy and Management.
DeLong, who said he’s seen the latest draft of the bill, told CT Examiner that the Fair Share provision now “takes more of a focus onto planning and regional planning in terms of infrastructure, in terms of understanding water and sewer and roads and making sure that we are putting together a cohesive plan that works across an entire region and not some type of hodgepodge that can’t be supported.”
DeLong added that many municipal leaders were upset with the vetoed version of the legislation this summer, because it used “arbitrary numbers” for affordable housing targets.
The latest housing bill draft, he said, is “not creating a number for regions where everything would be dumped into an urban center. … It’s a number that all towns and cities would have to meet, but it’s not going to be done through the Fair Share methodology, as much as being done through a planning methodology on the front end. Honestly, I think [the draft] is more workable.”
Specific language related to affordable housing is also being tweaked, according to State Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport, co-chair of the Housing Committee.
For example, Felipe said, it’s his understanding that language referring to “deeply affordable housing” was being changed to “housing people can afford.”
Felipe said, “we are hoping to do some very similar things that create progress, but we also don’t want to force anybody to feel like we are taking local control away; that was a concern of theirs.”
Felipe, who also co-chairs the 38-member all Democratic Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, said there were racial aspects to the crafting that he is not happy about.
“It does make me a little upset that we have to dumb down language to make it sound like less Black and Brown folks, you know, folks from poor neighborhoods, are moving into your community,” Felipe said. “I think people [should] just accept that housing is a human right, and anybody should be able to live where they want. …To some extent, it is people who do not want certain folks in the neighborhood. They say they want to protect the integrity of the neighborhood, keep it the way it is, and unfortunately, for some people, that means [keeping] the neighborhood less of color and more affluent.”
The housing bill, in its original form, would have also prohibited local authorities from enforcing minimum off-street parking requirements for residential projects with fewer than 24 units. And, the bill would have allowed any commercially zoned property to be converted, by right, into developments of between two and nine apartments.
From what he’s heard, Scott told CT Examiner that parking “is going to be easily negotiated… I think they will expand the parking and not make it so restrictive in terms of what the towns can’t do. I think that is an easy one.”